To my conservative family,

Why We Must Remember that Gender is Socially Constructed and Is Neither a Binary Nor Biological Determination: A Letter to My Conservative Family

Gender is real. Sex is real. However, they are not the same thing. Sex refers to how an individual was born biologically, so someone can be born female, male, or intersex. Gender, on the other hand, refers to how a person lives their life and how they see themselves. So transgender people are living their life in the gender they are, even if you don’t think so because they were born a different sex. Gender is a spectrum, and there is more to it than male, female, and transgender.

Gender is a social construct. Gender is a way society creates roles for people in life and in their personal relationships. Gender roles are so ingrained in us we don’t even notice them most of the time. But I urge you to wrap your head around the fact that gender is socially constructed. In reality, gender will always be a spectrum, with no fixed spots for people based solely on their biology, and there are more than two spots.

In a day and age where the legal system is finally realizing that transgender people have the right to live their life as they truly are, not based on the organs they were born with, I need you all to do the same.

Transgender individuals have difficulty when they go through the U.S. courts to establish that they are not the same gender as their biological sex at birth. Courts will rely on medicine when it comes to reassigning gender to a person, however medicine doesn’t have a concrete definition of what maleness or femaleness is. Courts also have no way of defining when an individual ‘changes’ so they may use metaphors. For example, one court framed the issue of reassigning gender with the metaphor “a rose is a rose.” This example suggests that when you take off one petal of a rose, it’s still a rose, but after some time it becomes a stem. This time is crucial for transgender rights, and questioning the courts to establish ideas of gender is important (Meadow, 2010).

So we are still in a time where it is difficult for transgender people to legally change their names and pronouns since they were born with the wrong ones. It seems pretty simple. I honestly don’t understand why it is such a big issue. Imagining waking up in a male body as someone who identifies as female. I would do everything in my power to live my life as a female. That is the reality for transgender individuals and it starts from birth.

Yes, gender nonconformists do exist. It’s hard for you to believe because all you’ve ever known are so-called traditions, where the woman serves the man dinner, the man works, women wear dresses, and many, many other gender roles. I need to repeat that gender is in fact a social construct. Some people don’t fit into gender roles. Some people feel like multiple genders, some people feel like different genders depending on the day, some people don’t feel like any genders.

I’m not saying you have to like it. I’m asking you to acknowledge that these individuals are real. I’m asking you to be open to the fact that gender isn’t biologically determined. Please remember that gender is non-binary, there is more than just females and males, and that gender is a social construct, not a biological determination. Please. Our family depends on it.